The Open IGERT: Internships @figshare @benchfly @plosone and more!

As I’ve said before, education is an important part of the IGERT training program. But there isn’t just a course component to the IGERT. The Open IGERT is working with the BEST open science companies on the planet to provide the best possible educational environment that I can possibly create. The internship and collaborational component of the Open IGERT is to me the most exciting aspect of this or any other IGERT and I’m very happy about all the people that are willing to collaborate with us to teach future scientists the importance and merits of being open.

Here are the opportunities that we’re working on:

figshare – What better way to educate IGERT trainees on open science and data management by getting an opportunity to work with one of the best open data repositories on the planet! With figshare, students will get to work with data of all different types, sizes, and colors and learn how to manage that data for the future. Not only that but they’ll learn how scientists interact and use the different data types and will get to develop user friendly and usable software. Because figshare is located in the UK we’ll be able to fund a few students to work with Mark in person, with lodging, and any other interested parties can work remotely from ABQ.

BenchFly – To me video documentation of scientific experiments is going to be the future of publication. Why present a paper when you can show exactly how you do your experiments, how you acquired the data, and how your results affect the world? Being able to develop a killer video protocol will be important to getting your science out there and doing it effectively. But BenchFly also is a data repository but for videos and they need to store, share, and analyze their data just like any other scientific endeavor. Like the experience from figshare, learning how to handle data of all different varieties and size will be crucial to their scientific career and developing an understanding of long term data management is exactly the kind of education the Open IGERT is hoping to provide.

PLOS One – I can’t see a better training opportunity for open scientists than working with the leading open access publisher. Open scientists will need to understand how open science can integrate with current scientific practices and publication. PLOS One is looking to innovate scientific publishing and the students I hope to train will be active innovators. To me there is no better pairing than that! And in the spirit of data management, students will get to see exactly how publishers safeguard the data that is entrusted to them via scientists from around the globe. Students will also get to see important aspects of publishing that many don’t get a chance to witness, and having an understanding of current publishing models can help push open science into the forefront of science.

Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja – We are partnering with the Computer Science Department at UTPL in Ecuador to host a student swap program. Open IGERT students may get to choose between a 5 week immersion program or a 10 week full study program. The idea behind this is some students may be hesitant to go to a foreign language county for an extended period of time and giving students the option to go for 5 weeks could be a more favorable amount of time. Aspects of the projects at UTPL are unknown at this point, but they will be of an open data perspective.

All of these internship opportunities are of course contingent of the Open IGERT proposal funding, but I’m very excited for the opportunities I was able to secure working with some of the best open science tools and enterprises in existence today!